Freier Einfall
Untitled (Based on Blaze) 1962, Bridget Riley
Freier Einfall, or free association, is the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. This is what the patient is asked to do; it is the work of analysis. The common injunction to “say everything,” while perhaps impossible in a literal sense, is made, in-session, into a specific practice: to say everything that comes through your mind, no matter how random, nonsensical or unpleasant. Some have argued—Ferenczi—that once the patient is able to free associate the analysis is at an end. To freely associate; Freier Einfall;1 a free incursion, an irruption, a force; the sudden fall of thoughts and feelings, like a sun-shower, from nowhere.
The stream of consciousness, coined in 1890 by William James and popularized in the literary styles of Joyce, Woolfe and Proust, becomes, in psycho-analysis, a mind-altering technique; a stream of unconsciousness; or to be more precise: a current of unconscious material determining the patient’s speech in the last instance. Though the gifted analyst may be able to hear this material at any time, the aim of analysis (in my view) is that, by developing a special receptivity in the act of freely associating, the patient will begin to hear it.
The voice in the patient’s head, otherwise known as the ego, a biased and narrowminded critic who assumes an authority (that it does not actually possess), will seek every means to limit the patient’s thoughts to what is normal, square and mean, to reduce their feelings to a nicety, to rule over their psyche as would a US immigrations officer, only allowing entry those thoughts and perceptions it deems valuable for the national (read narcissistic) interest. So the patient remains ignorant of most, if not all, of what is real. According to the patient’s ego—who is but a lowly border cop—the realm of the unconscious Id is a dangerous and terrible land full of undesirable feelings, unbearable urges, and grotesque phantasms that do not belong in polite society. It is the border cop’s duty to censure this realm from expression. And yet we must admit—and this the cop will be first to deny—that this is also the realm2 from which any new thought arrives, the very realm, in fact, of dreams, the imagination, and the unilateral origin of all love and desire; in short, it is the occult source of every human anomaly.
Though Freud deploys the fundamental rule from the very beginning of his practice, it is in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that he maps out the Einfall as a peculiar psychical state—in which the censoring ego is disabled, his badge and gun removed. It is a state of inward observation, “which, in its distribution of psychical energy (that is, of mobile attention), bears some analogy to the state before falling asleep…As we fall asleep ‘involuntary ideas’ emerge, owing to the relaxation of a certain deliberate (and no doubt also critical) activity which we allow to influence the course of our ideas while we are awake.” (This intermediate state of falling asleep—the hypnogogic zone—has been a source of creative breakthrough from time immemorial: Aristotle, Blake, Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Poe, Kafka, Dali and the surrealists, have each paid attention to the strange images that seem to arrive unbidden, from nowhere. The significance of the fainting couch—the chaise-lounge—in the psychoanalytic office is due to these “involuntary ideas” that may emerge in this magic zone prior to sleep; as the prone body relaxes, so does the mind.)
The culprit of this “critical activity” is reason. Freud proceeds again by analogy, likening the Einfall to poetic creation, and quoting the idealist poet Schiller on the topic of the failure to write poetry—or, what we complain of today, writer’s block: “it seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in—at the very gateway, as it were… On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason—so it seems to me—relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell…”
We may gather from this that what Freud means by the free in the freier Einfall—its very mobility—is due to nothing less than the suspension of the authority of reason. The suspension of the rational ego is at the same time a surrendering to a momentum from elsewhere (but that also happens to be you: what Tantra calls the bodymind). The practice of free associating therefore is not epistemological; positivist knowledge is not the point; quite the opposite: the receptivity developed by the Einfall is precisely a kind of unknowing.
In this regard the Einfall, as a mystical practice that brings about a special psychical state (in both poet and patient), is probably not so different in kind from the parallel practice of evenly suspended attention by which, as Freud maintains, the analyst catches “the drift of the patient's unconscious with his own unconscious.” They are both altered states in which the “I” has been destabilized; each are receptive modes of listening to it.
See also:
Blaze (1964) Bridget Riley
